Modeling and Quantitative Ultrasound
The applications of an ultrasound pulse-echo system range from the reliable detection of critical flaws in manufactured parts, to identification of the surface topology of organs or tissues, to object recognition in an ocean environment. The energy optimization method, carried out by then MS student in Electrical and Computer Engineering,Aditya Nadkarni, is used to improve the ability of a pulse-echo system to quantify specific aspects of a reflecting structure or to identify a given reflector geometry.
The motivation behind this work is the notion that a customized transducer field and receiver characteristics may lead to improved identification of structures over conventional ultrasound systems. When using a single element transducer, such as a focused or planar transducer, the acoustic field and the receiver characteristics are fixed parameters. Due to this, the received signal from a given reflector at a given location is predetermined, hence providing only a static (non-optimizable) ability to identify specific features of the reflecting object. With ultrasound array transducers, such as linear and annular arrays, a large number of different insonifying fields can be produced, by varying the relative excitation delay and amplitude applied to the individual transducer elements. In a similar fashion, a large number of different receiver characteristics can be specified. The goal has been to use these delay variables to achieve a specified optimization task, specifically based on an annular array.
Last modified: March 11, 2008 14:01:35